[Challenge] Summarized Chronicles of Adventuresome Romance
A fanfiction on the Hana Yori Dango manga-verse.
Characters: Domyouji & Makino
Unlike the last time Makino Tsukushi decided to visit her idiot of a boyfriend an ocean and a continent away, which was more than three years ago, she didn’t precipitously just decide to embark on this one. In fact, it wasn’t exactly she who decided to visit, being that she was both too penniless and too busy to even dream of such a vacation. Maybe if she had been proactive enough to even try making such a reunion happen (and she was Tsukushi the weed: she could make things happen, granted it took a plethora of pain and suffering on her part), the hands of Fate wouldn’t have been forced into plopping her yet again in dire circumstances.
Then again, the said hands of Fate were apparently under the influence of her pigheaded boyfriend a.k.a. King of the World, so she gave up dwelling on the chain of misfortunes she had undergone to get where she was. After all, she was already there-within strangling distance of one Domyouji Tsukasa. Her fingers twitched, with a sudden, hideous purpose. Only barely did she stamp down the spastic, possibly slightly homicidal, urge to pull him into a headlock.
He had enough of an instinct for self-preservation to flinch when she directed her glare to his direction. “What?” he snapped.
“Just do it already,” she intoned in a deathly tone.
His brown eyes could have popped out of their sockets in his surprise. She was tempted to shove them back in with two mittened fingers. “Do what?” he demanded.
“Whatever is next in your grand script of adventuresome romance.” She fixed her arms akimbo and rose to her full height. “You’re going to jump into the icy river, right? Tell me you can’t live without cruel indifferent me? Or maybe I should push you in, then later mourn over your frozen, fish-eaten corpse till you’ve thawed enough to stink. Bet it would thrill your pigheaded ghost to hear how much I regret murdering you in cold blood, huh? Huh?!”
“I brought you here to cool down!” he protested, moving away from the black metal railing in spite of himself. “Jumping into rivers. . . fish-eaten Ore-sama. You and your weird ideas!”
“In case you haven’t noticed, I’m freezing already! And it’s ‘cool off,’ you idiot. Don’t even try being funny.”
“I’m not being funny!”
“You think?!” she shrieked. “Do I look like I’m laughing right now?”
“Why are you so angry?” he asked irritably. “You ungrateful woman, you. I took a lot of pains to symphonate all this, and this is the kind of treatment I get?”
“It’s orchestrate!” she exclaimed in exasperation. “Orches-never mind. Gah!”
She pivoted with an emphatic humph and promptly connected against the stone steps. They were still pretty hard despite the fluffy layer of newly-fallen snow, as her tail bone discovered, even though she didn’t actually impact the ground as hard as she should have. Domyouji had caught her by the armpits as she was going down, and it was this way she dangled awkwardly, half-sitting, the heels of her sneakers supporting the weight he wasn’t. She used his frame to steady herself as she stood up, shooed him away, and continued down her path with as much dignity as she could muster.
“Where are you going?”
“Somewhere.”
“You know where that is?”
“I’ll figure it out!”
Her unwanted companion sighed ostentatiously. “I guess, I’d have to go with you,” he said in a bored tone. “Since you’re the type of person who always gets in trouble.”
“Do whatever you want.”
===
Yesterday was mundane enough. She had successfully crammed a five-page essay demonstrating the efficacy of hypnosis as a treatment for warts, a writing exercise from an eccentric professor the night before and was about to embark on to seven-hours of school. She had a more high-paying part-time job, nowadays, but she still helped out in the dango shop for old time’s sake, and that was where she was leaving from that morning.
Her planned day didn’t progress much thereafter. Enter men in black suits and a fancy high-end car; obviously, it was another kidnaping.
Hers.
There was nothing much she remembered till she had woken up in a sparsely-furnished room, in a bed so hedonistically soft, she was practically embedded in the fluffy layers of mattress padding. The night gown she found herself in, though modestly-cut, was flimsy enough to tear when she accidentally stepped on it, as she was scrambling out of the sea of luxuriant white sheets. A sheer burgundy panel fluttered from the high ceiling, undulating over a wide spanning window. (It was underneath an air-conditioning vent.)The breathtaking mixture of grays, a light forlorn shade for the skies and a dark gritty one for the jungle of buildings, mixed with the ocher of brick buildings, was unmistakably foreign.
Tottering about in a panicky daze, Tsukushi nearly tripped down some steps coming away from the bed, which was elevated by a dais of sorts. In the middle of the room was a slender table of wrought metal, its black striking against the monochrome of white all else. It reached to her chest. On it was single. . . what else? A rose. It was so vividly red, she stared at it a good minute before picking up the accompanying envelope: instructions, apparently.
A challenge to the Weed-girl: Right now, you are in a shining Citadel in the City of the World. Soon, you will be ushered out of this stronghold and into the chaos of the commoner world. Enclosed is a map and some pocket change. Ride the Underground Dragons and seek your price in the Village of Commerce. Your handsome and mighty Prince awaits you!
With the note was a map of the New York City subways, translated in Japanese, littered with little caricatures labeled with “you are here” (an SD rendition of a snoring her) and “the finish line” (a question mark enclosed by a heart). There was also an inch-thick pile of newly-minted hundred dollar bills.
“P-pocket change?” Tsukishi spluttered. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
There was a post-script at the bottom of the note, she then noticed.
P.S. You better be outta there by 9. The old hag’s coming back from Japan today. ~ Ore-sama.
Tsukishi looked at the clock in horror: it was 08:53.
===
Needless to say, it took one hell of a scramble to be able to leave the condo unit before the dreaded nine o’clock deadline. She barely paid attention to clothes set out for her, fixated with the need to be as far away as possible from Domyouji Kaede. (She actually slept in Domyouji Kaede’s bed?!) The first thing she did upon reaching the ground floor was fall on her face in exhaustion, having ran down ten flights of stairs before deciding to take the elevator for the last seven floors. Waving away the alarm of the doorkeeper, she laughed a tad hysterically and exited the building at a dead run.
The moment she reached asphalt, she careened to a stop. Several reasons why, really: 1) a ferocious gust of wind froze her on the spot, 2) seeing the people walking around her brought home how horribly overdressed she was, and 3) she really was in New York City.
“This is unbelievable,” she wailed, reeling from the massive readjustment her brain was undergoing, placing the misplaced thousands of miles and twenty-something hours.
She started from her funk, instantly recovering, and groped for the provided map in her pockets.
“Domyouji, that insane bastard,” she muttered, further incensed by the idiotic caricatures she would have found endearing were she not lost in an immense city, after being kidnapped and smuggled into it, no less.
With some difficulty, she was able to orient herself. She stared at the map and compared them with the street signs. 5th Avenue. 8th Street. Her directions she figured out by scrambling from one block to the next, and back again when she struck wrong. She figured her furry, many-buckled attire wasn’t so out there, after all, since the bustle of people didn’t stop to gape at her nor give her more than the usual cursory glance.
The cold was deadly, however, and she thanked her lucky stars she had forgone the stiletto-heeled boots poised at the foot of the bed, even though her old battered sneakers weren’t appropriate with her black, skin-tight body suit or the fluffy-collared coat of some insanely soft, luxuriant material. It was hard enough walking on the wet pavement; the snow seemed to disintegrate on contact with the ground and didn’t seem to be building up yet. . .
She managed a glance at the Empire State building, as instructed in her caricatured map, quite a ways from where she was but still visible. There was a university nearby, apparently, and she guessed most of the people she was seeing were students. She wondered whether that was the school Domyouji went to.
She had a hell of a time finding the subway station she needed to go to, however. Even though her English had improved bounds after college (and the F3 mercilessly tutoring her) she wasn’t quite up to interrupting some random person’s brisk pace to stammer some likely incoherent question. Plus, she learned quite quickly that the more relaxed pedestrians were usually tourists, as well-which was not to say she counted herself as a tourist. She’s victim here, she maintained.
Eventually, she did find it, managed to get into the right train, the yellow N train, just as the door started closing, and almost died when she realized she didn’t even bother to check whether that train was going to the right direction.
Another panicked scramble for the map ensued. She compared it to the electronic diagram that blinked the train’s current position in its itinerary and managed to figure that she was indeed on the right track (no pun intended) after the first stop. She was no stranger to crowds and the shifting influx of people, so that wasn’t a problem. She did stop to curiously watch the one-man band playing at one bend of the tunnel that led out of the station, the one she got off at as instructed by his Highness, Ore-sama. People didn’t seem to think much of him, but she found his music quite lively.
And then she was back to the maze of streets and buildings and people. There was more snow on the ground now, and a couple of times, the gust of wind practically stilled her erratic, searching steps. There was a huge complex that was fenced around, and seemed to be blocking the way she was supposed to follow, a construction site, she figured. She wandered about it, trying to figure out where she could slip through, till she finally followed a group of very solemn people, listening to a tour guide. Then, she found herself in a glass-enclosed walkway, that overlooked the massive closed-off area. It was half-cleared of rubble and occupied by heavy machineries at work. This was the Ground Zero marked on the caricature map, a site of tragedy from a few years back. She stood silent in contemplation, forgetting momentarily her colorful homicidal fantasies.
When her eyes went back to focus, she saw the bronzed sign over the doorway in front of her (which was suspiciously devoid of people, by the way.) World Financial One, it said, and her eyes widened in realization.
She was there.
She was there in that beautiful place that was destined to be the crime scene for a certain almighty person’s violent murder!
She slunk away sheepishly upon noticing a harried-looking man and his triumvirate of toddlers staring at her.
It was out of the weather and out of the snow, but it was still another rat maze. She wandered around the building, until a guard took pity on her and inquired if she was okay. She waved away his concern with a nervous laugh, then hesitantly asked for the Domyouji group offices. It was in an adjoining building, she gathered from his reply, and she thanked the man effusively. Then of course, she forgot to ask where exactly that other building was. . .
And ended up wandering into some kind of mall, terminating into an atrium under a stunning skylight, populated at its fringes by various restaurants and boutiques, and finally into a Starbucks. It was filled to brimming with people, so when she thought she saw him, she figured she must have been hallucinating. But then, that lordly tone of voice floating above the din of lively conversation, even in a another language, was just too singular, just too exasperating, just too reminiscent, and just too. . .
Him.
===
The first exit she managed to reach lead to a courtyard of sorts, blazing white with snow. Beside it was some body of water, drab and murky like the skies. It was along this she started to walk, following the metal railing that barred her from the water. She could hear his footfalls, a few feet behind her.
On her right were trees, most of them naked, frosted with ice. Behind and among them were various buildings-it looked like people lived in them. More proximal to her were park benches and unlit lantern posts, regularly spaced along the paved walkway. The snow still fell steadily, though she doubted a camera would be able to pick it up, had she somehow had one. She concentrated on making new foot prints on the carpet of snow, studiously avoiding the older ones, varying in stages of fading.
The balustrade had accumulated a good few inches of snow; on one spot, the woolly mantle was decorated by a few awkward letters, a name. She walked past this and chose an undisturbed area.
Ma ki no Tsu ku shi.
“That way, even a certain moron can read it,” she muttered rather fiercely.
Her unwanted companion yawned theatrically, then brushed past her. He began writing on the snow, too, her name in Kanji.
“Well, that’s. . .” she stammered. “If you don’t know something that simple, you’d have another thing coming.”
He merely gave her one of his blank expressions of superlative superiority, a look that was not quite a glare, not quite a sneer-he was too bored to commit his facial muscles to either. He walked on a few paces, then leaned against the railing, looking far out into the water.
Tsukushi thought she felt a vein pop. Even in the spartan trench coat that topped his expensive business suit, Ore-sama managed to look he was somehow the victim.
She counted to ten and managed to keep from kicking him in the head. After all, she had already beaned him with a package of coffee a while ago, which caused had him to lose his balance and hit his head on the counter top, managing in the process to knock aside the labeled paper cups the barista had lined up an easily accessible area, spattering their steaming hot contents amongst the other patrons.
(That was actually why Tsukushi had ran out of the building.)
Instead, she leaned against the railing, as well, choosing a spot that judiciously kept a good distance between them. She looked at the sea and followed his line of vision. Through the fog she could make out a vague skyline. An island?
“Where are we?” she asked abruptly.
“Battery Park City,” he answered.
“What’s that across there?”
“Atlantic City, New Jersey.”
“How do you know?” she narrowed her eyes at him suspiciously. “Isn’t that too common knowledge for Ore-sama to have? And why were you at Starbucks? Isn’t that a commoner thing here in America?”
“I was trying to make Ore-sama more accessional to you.”
“Accessible! It’s accessible!”
“I meant, accessional,” he said in the same uncharacteristically too-calm voice. He shifted and quirked an eyebrow at her. “What? That word’s not a part of my chosen girl’s vocabulary?”
Tsukushi sputtered, now even more imbalanced. “W-why. . . Wh-is that the Statue of Liberty?!”
Domyouji did not take well to her shoving him aside for a better view. “Yes, that’s the Statue of Liberty!” he finally snapped. “It’s been there for centurions!”
“Centurions? Then why didn’t you point it out to me?” She tiptoed, moved around, and struggled to get a better view. “I can’t see it from here! I’m moving closer.”
She wasn’t able to move, suddenly. He held her at an arm’s length away by her upper arms, effectively pinning both to her sides. She stared at his serious expression, bewildered, bothered.
“. . . why?” she croaked out.
“You weren’t done vituperating me.”
“Vi. . . vi. . . Wait. That word actually exists.”
He rolled his eyes at her very, very slightly. “Of course. All the words I use exist.”
“That’s debatable, you know.”
“Ask,” he intoned imperiously.
“Alright, alright. Geeze! So impatient!”
He shook her lightly.
“What’s up with that stupid treasure hunt thing?”
“I wanted you to experience the commoner way of getting to me.”
“With thousands of dollars in my pockets?” She felt even colder think of it. “I actually feared for my life. And getting kidnapped and smuggled is hardly common.”
“Uncommon?” he retorted. “Don’t you read the newspaper?”
The question stumped her. “Why would I read American newspapers?”
He ignored that one. “Doesn’t matter, anyway. You won.”
“. . . Oh, yeah.” Then. “You are so full of it! How did you pull it off?”
“Ore-sama’s secrets of operation.”
“The creative vice-president?”
He shook her a little more vehemently this time. “Stubborn woman still not asking the right question,” he growled.
“Okay, okay, okay!” Her head stopped wobbling. “Why did you bring me here?”
He snorted incredulously.
“Fair enough,” she conceded. “Okay then. Aside from the fact Ore-sama can’t live without little old me and is insane and arrogant and filthy rich enough to suddenly pluck ordinary, downtrodden, pathetically poor people from their usual and may I say hectic lives, is there anything specific you wanted?”
“An answer.”
She froze. Her hammering heart was painfully conspicuous in the sudden, inner stillness.
“Too threatening?” He relinquished her.
“A. . . ah.” Fervently, she wished her body wouldn’t start getting weird on her. Knowing her luck, her stomach would probably start growling or she’d suddenly decided she wanted to tapdance for absolutely no reason. . . Oh, but she knew the real reason: the four years were over. It was much easier to feint, to dillydally from the eventual point they needed, wanted to reach. Easier to pull a stunt that would deflect the intensity of unwordable emotions, to something more defined like embarrassment or indignation or-
“. . . Let’s have lunch first.”
She almost fell over. Almost. “Oh. A-all right.” Her stomach growled empathically. “I am hungry.”
He was reaching for his pocket. “I’ll call for a car.”
“What?” She recovered. “Why? You weakling! What’s the use of those ridiculously long legs of yours if you don’t use them? We didn’t walk that far.”
“You think?” He gestured behind them with an imperial toss of his head.
Their footsteps stretched far, far behind them, finally disappearing around a bend. She didn’t even know which building they had originally come from. They were now in what seemed like a wharf of sorts, with a ferry boat chugging away some distance from it.
“Hey, don’t stand there stupidly staring.” He was already a few paces away from her.
“And don’t stand there stupidly-stupidly. . . ” She broke off with distaste, unable to come up with a satisfying retort. “Oh, just shut up.”
Nonetheless, she jogged to where he was, brighter in spirits in spite of herself. We really was impossible most of the time, but sometimes. . . sometimes, he was just right. She latched on to an arm and yanked at it vindictively.
“Stupid woman getting scared and panicky. You should know I’ll never let anything happen to you.”
“Hey! If you’re going to keep on doing that spying thing, I won’t-”
“Who would want to spy on your bird-boned body?”
“Y-you pervert! I didn’t mean spy that way!”
They walked on, forward.
End.
May 24, 2007 (4:22am)
Hahaha. Just senseless cheese.
This is based on a my and my cousin's perusal of downtown Manhattan. That was a lot of walking, let me tell you.
. . . I have to sleep now. hehe
Characters: Domyouji & Makino
Unlike the last time Makino Tsukushi decided to visit her idiot of a boyfriend an ocean and a continent away, which was more than three years ago, she didn’t precipitously just decide to embark on this one. In fact, it wasn’t exactly she who decided to visit, being that she was both too penniless and too busy to even dream of such a vacation. Maybe if she had been proactive enough to even try making such a reunion happen (and she was Tsukushi the weed: she could make things happen, granted it took a plethora of pain and suffering on her part), the hands of Fate wouldn’t have been forced into plopping her yet again in dire circumstances.
Then again, the said hands of Fate were apparently under the influence of her pigheaded boyfriend a.k.a. King of the World, so she gave up dwelling on the chain of misfortunes she had undergone to get where she was. After all, she was already there-within strangling distance of one Domyouji Tsukasa. Her fingers twitched, with a sudden, hideous purpose. Only barely did she stamp down the spastic, possibly slightly homicidal, urge to pull him into a headlock.
He had enough of an instinct for self-preservation to flinch when she directed her glare to his direction. “What?” he snapped.
“Just do it already,” she intoned in a deathly tone.
His brown eyes could have popped out of their sockets in his surprise. She was tempted to shove them back in with two mittened fingers. “Do what?” he demanded.
“Whatever is next in your grand script of adventuresome romance.” She fixed her arms akimbo and rose to her full height. “You’re going to jump into the icy river, right? Tell me you can’t live without cruel indifferent me? Or maybe I should push you in, then later mourn over your frozen, fish-eaten corpse till you’ve thawed enough to stink. Bet it would thrill your pigheaded ghost to hear how much I regret murdering you in cold blood, huh? Huh?!”
“I brought you here to cool down!” he protested, moving away from the black metal railing in spite of himself. “Jumping into rivers. . . fish-eaten Ore-sama. You and your weird ideas!”
“In case you haven’t noticed, I’m freezing already! And it’s ‘cool off,’ you idiot. Don’t even try being funny.”
“I’m not being funny!”
“You think?!” she shrieked. “Do I look like I’m laughing right now?”
“Why are you so angry?” he asked irritably. “You ungrateful woman, you. I took a lot of pains to symphonate all this, and this is the kind of treatment I get?”
“It’s orchestrate!” she exclaimed in exasperation. “Orches-never mind. Gah!”
She pivoted with an emphatic humph and promptly connected against the stone steps. They were still pretty hard despite the fluffy layer of newly-fallen snow, as her tail bone discovered, even though she didn’t actually impact the ground as hard as she should have. Domyouji had caught her by the armpits as she was going down, and it was this way she dangled awkwardly, half-sitting, the heels of her sneakers supporting the weight he wasn’t. She used his frame to steady herself as she stood up, shooed him away, and continued down her path with as much dignity as she could muster.
“Where are you going?”
“Somewhere.”
“You know where that is?”
“I’ll figure it out!”
Her unwanted companion sighed ostentatiously. “I guess, I’d have to go with you,” he said in a bored tone. “Since you’re the type of person who always gets in trouble.”
“Do whatever you want.”
===
Yesterday was mundane enough. She had successfully crammed a five-page essay demonstrating the efficacy of hypnosis as a treatment for warts, a writing exercise from an eccentric professor the night before and was about to embark on to seven-hours of school. She had a more high-paying part-time job, nowadays, but she still helped out in the dango shop for old time’s sake, and that was where she was leaving from that morning.
Her planned day didn’t progress much thereafter. Enter men in black suits and a fancy high-end car; obviously, it was another kidnaping.
Hers.
There was nothing much she remembered till she had woken up in a sparsely-furnished room, in a bed so hedonistically soft, she was practically embedded in the fluffy layers of mattress padding. The night gown she found herself in, though modestly-cut, was flimsy enough to tear when she accidentally stepped on it, as she was scrambling out of the sea of luxuriant white sheets. A sheer burgundy panel fluttered from the high ceiling, undulating over a wide spanning window. (It was underneath an air-conditioning vent.)The breathtaking mixture of grays, a light forlorn shade for the skies and a dark gritty one for the jungle of buildings, mixed with the ocher of brick buildings, was unmistakably foreign.
Tottering about in a panicky daze, Tsukushi nearly tripped down some steps coming away from the bed, which was elevated by a dais of sorts. In the middle of the room was a slender table of wrought metal, its black striking against the monochrome of white all else. It reached to her chest. On it was single. . . what else? A rose. It was so vividly red, she stared at it a good minute before picking up the accompanying envelope: instructions, apparently.
A challenge to the Weed-girl: Right now, you are in a shining Citadel in the City of the World. Soon, you will be ushered out of this stronghold and into the chaos of the commoner world. Enclosed is a map and some pocket change. Ride the Underground Dragons and seek your price in the Village of Commerce. Your handsome and mighty Prince awaits you!
With the note was a map of the New York City subways, translated in Japanese, littered with little caricatures labeled with “you are here” (an SD rendition of a snoring her) and “the finish line” (a question mark enclosed by a heart). There was also an inch-thick pile of newly-minted hundred dollar bills.
“P-pocket change?” Tsukishi spluttered. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
There was a post-script at the bottom of the note, she then noticed.
P.S. You better be outta there by 9. The old hag’s coming back from Japan today. ~ Ore-sama.
Tsukishi looked at the clock in horror: it was 08:53.
===
Needless to say, it took one hell of a scramble to be able to leave the condo unit before the dreaded nine o’clock deadline. She barely paid attention to clothes set out for her, fixated with the need to be as far away as possible from Domyouji Kaede. (She actually slept in Domyouji Kaede’s bed?!) The first thing she did upon reaching the ground floor was fall on her face in exhaustion, having ran down ten flights of stairs before deciding to take the elevator for the last seven floors. Waving away the alarm of the doorkeeper, she laughed a tad hysterically and exited the building at a dead run.
The moment she reached asphalt, she careened to a stop. Several reasons why, really: 1) a ferocious gust of wind froze her on the spot, 2) seeing the people walking around her brought home how horribly overdressed she was, and 3) she really was in New York City.
“This is unbelievable,” she wailed, reeling from the massive readjustment her brain was undergoing, placing the misplaced thousands of miles and twenty-something hours.
She started from her funk, instantly recovering, and groped for the provided map in her pockets.
“Domyouji, that insane bastard,” she muttered, further incensed by the idiotic caricatures she would have found endearing were she not lost in an immense city, after being kidnapped and smuggled into it, no less.
With some difficulty, she was able to orient herself. She stared at the map and compared them with the street signs. 5th Avenue. 8th Street. Her directions she figured out by scrambling from one block to the next, and back again when she struck wrong. She figured her furry, many-buckled attire wasn’t so out there, after all, since the bustle of people didn’t stop to gape at her nor give her more than the usual cursory glance.
The cold was deadly, however, and she thanked her lucky stars she had forgone the stiletto-heeled boots poised at the foot of the bed, even though her old battered sneakers weren’t appropriate with her black, skin-tight body suit or the fluffy-collared coat of some insanely soft, luxuriant material. It was hard enough walking on the wet pavement; the snow seemed to disintegrate on contact with the ground and didn’t seem to be building up yet. . .
She managed a glance at the Empire State building, as instructed in her caricatured map, quite a ways from where she was but still visible. There was a university nearby, apparently, and she guessed most of the people she was seeing were students. She wondered whether that was the school Domyouji went to.
She had a hell of a time finding the subway station she needed to go to, however. Even though her English had improved bounds after college (and the F3 mercilessly tutoring her) she wasn’t quite up to interrupting some random person’s brisk pace to stammer some likely incoherent question. Plus, she learned quite quickly that the more relaxed pedestrians were usually tourists, as well-which was not to say she counted herself as a tourist. She’s victim here, she maintained.
Eventually, she did find it, managed to get into the right train, the yellow N train, just as the door started closing, and almost died when she realized she didn’t even bother to check whether that train was going to the right direction.
Another panicked scramble for the map ensued. She compared it to the electronic diagram that blinked the train’s current position in its itinerary and managed to figure that she was indeed on the right track (no pun intended) after the first stop. She was no stranger to crowds and the shifting influx of people, so that wasn’t a problem. She did stop to curiously watch the one-man band playing at one bend of the tunnel that led out of the station, the one she got off at as instructed by his Highness, Ore-sama. People didn’t seem to think much of him, but she found his music quite lively.
And then she was back to the maze of streets and buildings and people. There was more snow on the ground now, and a couple of times, the gust of wind practically stilled her erratic, searching steps. There was a huge complex that was fenced around, and seemed to be blocking the way she was supposed to follow, a construction site, she figured. She wandered about it, trying to figure out where she could slip through, till she finally followed a group of very solemn people, listening to a tour guide. Then, she found herself in a glass-enclosed walkway, that overlooked the massive closed-off area. It was half-cleared of rubble and occupied by heavy machineries at work. This was the Ground Zero marked on the caricature map, a site of tragedy from a few years back. She stood silent in contemplation, forgetting momentarily her colorful homicidal fantasies.
When her eyes went back to focus, she saw the bronzed sign over the doorway in front of her (which was suspiciously devoid of people, by the way.) World Financial One, it said, and her eyes widened in realization.
She was there.
She was there in that beautiful place that was destined to be the crime scene for a certain almighty person’s violent murder!
She slunk away sheepishly upon noticing a harried-looking man and his triumvirate of toddlers staring at her.
It was out of the weather and out of the snow, but it was still another rat maze. She wandered around the building, until a guard took pity on her and inquired if she was okay. She waved away his concern with a nervous laugh, then hesitantly asked for the Domyouji group offices. It was in an adjoining building, she gathered from his reply, and she thanked the man effusively. Then of course, she forgot to ask where exactly that other building was. . .
And ended up wandering into some kind of mall, terminating into an atrium under a stunning skylight, populated at its fringes by various restaurants and boutiques, and finally into a Starbucks. It was filled to brimming with people, so when she thought she saw him, she figured she must have been hallucinating. But then, that lordly tone of voice floating above the din of lively conversation, even in a another language, was just too singular, just too exasperating, just too reminiscent, and just too. . .
Him.
===
The first exit she managed to reach lead to a courtyard of sorts, blazing white with snow. Beside it was some body of water, drab and murky like the skies. It was along this she started to walk, following the metal railing that barred her from the water. She could hear his footfalls, a few feet behind her.
On her right were trees, most of them naked, frosted with ice. Behind and among them were various buildings-it looked like people lived in them. More proximal to her were park benches and unlit lantern posts, regularly spaced along the paved walkway. The snow still fell steadily, though she doubted a camera would be able to pick it up, had she somehow had one. She concentrated on making new foot prints on the carpet of snow, studiously avoiding the older ones, varying in stages of fading.
The balustrade had accumulated a good few inches of snow; on one spot, the woolly mantle was decorated by a few awkward letters, a name. She walked past this and chose an undisturbed area.
Ma ki no Tsu ku shi.
“That way, even a certain moron can read it,” she muttered rather fiercely.
Her unwanted companion yawned theatrically, then brushed past her. He began writing on the snow, too, her name in Kanji.
“Well, that’s. . .” she stammered. “If you don’t know something that simple, you’d have another thing coming.”
He merely gave her one of his blank expressions of superlative superiority, a look that was not quite a glare, not quite a sneer-he was too bored to commit his facial muscles to either. He walked on a few paces, then leaned against the railing, looking far out into the water.
Tsukushi thought she felt a vein pop. Even in the spartan trench coat that topped his expensive business suit, Ore-sama managed to look he was somehow the victim.
She counted to ten and managed to keep from kicking him in the head. After all, she had already beaned him with a package of coffee a while ago, which caused had him to lose his balance and hit his head on the counter top, managing in the process to knock aside the labeled paper cups the barista had lined up an easily accessible area, spattering their steaming hot contents amongst the other patrons.
(That was actually why Tsukushi had ran out of the building.)
Instead, she leaned against the railing, as well, choosing a spot that judiciously kept a good distance between them. She looked at the sea and followed his line of vision. Through the fog she could make out a vague skyline. An island?
“Where are we?” she asked abruptly.
“Battery Park City,” he answered.
“What’s that across there?”
“Atlantic City, New Jersey.”
“How do you know?” she narrowed her eyes at him suspiciously. “Isn’t that too common knowledge for Ore-sama to have? And why were you at Starbucks? Isn’t that a commoner thing here in America?”
“I was trying to make Ore-sama more accessional to you.”
“Accessible! It’s accessible!”
“I meant, accessional,” he said in the same uncharacteristically too-calm voice. He shifted and quirked an eyebrow at her. “What? That word’s not a part of my chosen girl’s vocabulary?”
Tsukushi sputtered, now even more imbalanced. “W-why. . . Wh-is that the Statue of Liberty?!”
Domyouji did not take well to her shoving him aside for a better view. “Yes, that’s the Statue of Liberty!” he finally snapped. “It’s been there for centurions!”
“Centurions? Then why didn’t you point it out to me?” She tiptoed, moved around, and struggled to get a better view. “I can’t see it from here! I’m moving closer.”
She wasn’t able to move, suddenly. He held her at an arm’s length away by her upper arms, effectively pinning both to her sides. She stared at his serious expression, bewildered, bothered.
“. . . why?” she croaked out.
“You weren’t done vituperating me.”
“Vi. . . vi. . . Wait. That word actually exists.”
He rolled his eyes at her very, very slightly. “Of course. All the words I use exist.”
“That’s debatable, you know.”
“Ask,” he intoned imperiously.
“Alright, alright. Geeze! So impatient!”
He shook her lightly.
“What’s up with that stupid treasure hunt thing?”
“I wanted you to experience the commoner way of getting to me.”
“With thousands of dollars in my pockets?” She felt even colder think of it. “I actually feared for my life. And getting kidnapped and smuggled is hardly common.”
“Uncommon?” he retorted. “Don’t you read the newspaper?”
The question stumped her. “Why would I read American newspapers?”
He ignored that one. “Doesn’t matter, anyway. You won.”
“. . . Oh, yeah.” Then. “You are so full of it! How did you pull it off?”
“Ore-sama’s secrets of operation.”
“The creative vice-president?”
He shook her a little more vehemently this time. “Stubborn woman still not asking the right question,” he growled.
“Okay, okay, okay!” Her head stopped wobbling. “Why did you bring me here?”
He snorted incredulously.
“Fair enough,” she conceded. “Okay then. Aside from the fact Ore-sama can’t live without little old me and is insane and arrogant and filthy rich enough to suddenly pluck ordinary, downtrodden, pathetically poor people from their usual and may I say hectic lives, is there anything specific you wanted?”
“An answer.”
She froze. Her hammering heart was painfully conspicuous in the sudden, inner stillness.
“Too threatening?” He relinquished her.
“A. . . ah.” Fervently, she wished her body wouldn’t start getting weird on her. Knowing her luck, her stomach would probably start growling or she’d suddenly decided she wanted to tapdance for absolutely no reason. . . Oh, but she knew the real reason: the four years were over. It was much easier to feint, to dillydally from the eventual point they needed, wanted to reach. Easier to pull a stunt that would deflect the intensity of unwordable emotions, to something more defined like embarrassment or indignation or-
“. . . Let’s have lunch first.”
She almost fell over. Almost. “Oh. A-all right.” Her stomach growled empathically. “I am hungry.”
He was reaching for his pocket. “I’ll call for a car.”
“What?” She recovered. “Why? You weakling! What’s the use of those ridiculously long legs of yours if you don’t use them? We didn’t walk that far.”
“You think?” He gestured behind them with an imperial toss of his head.
Their footsteps stretched far, far behind them, finally disappearing around a bend. She didn’t even know which building they had originally come from. They were now in what seemed like a wharf of sorts, with a ferry boat chugging away some distance from it.
“Hey, don’t stand there stupidly staring.” He was already a few paces away from her.
“And don’t stand there stupidly-stupidly. . . ” She broke off with distaste, unable to come up with a satisfying retort. “Oh, just shut up.”
Nonetheless, she jogged to where he was, brighter in spirits in spite of herself. We really was impossible most of the time, but sometimes. . . sometimes, he was just right. She latched on to an arm and yanked at it vindictively.
“Stupid woman getting scared and panicky. You should know I’ll never let anything happen to you.”
“Hey! If you’re going to keep on doing that spying thing, I won’t-”
“Who would want to spy on your bird-boned body?”
“Y-you pervert! I didn’t mean spy that way!”
They walked on, forward.
End.
May 24, 2007 (4:22am)
Hahaha. Just senseless cheese.
This is based on a my and my cousin's perusal of downtown Manhattan. That was a lot of walking, let me tell you.
. . . I have to sleep now. hehe